Multi-pathway medicine, AI, and Europe’s HealthTech opportunity
Published in , 2026
We believe in a world where the ongoing digitalisation of healthcare and the opportunities created by modern diagnostics, from whole genome sequencing to mass spectrometry, will enable the assessment of patients across multiple disease pathways and hypotheses, rather than centering data around a single hypothesis.
The importance of this shift is illustrated by one of the most prevalent diseases: Coronary Artery Disease. Many patients present with no symptoms, yet have an encounter with a healthcare institution within six months prior to a myocardial infarction. Despite this, they are often only diagnosed and treated after the infarction, by which time many have already suffered damage to their myocardium (heart muscle), experienced a potentially preventable degradation in their quality of life, or, in the worst case, lost their lives.
This is where AI can play an important role. AI can unlock the hidden value of routine healthcare data today, generating additional diagnostic information and enabling earlier intervention across many diseases. We imagine a world where every biopsy and blood test is exposed to multiple algorithms at near-zero marginal computational cost.
That vision, however, remains a long-term aspiration. The near-zero cost is today, of course, still a utopia. Clinical adoption remains, rightly so, a time-consuming and expensive endeavour, especially as Europe builds the infrastructure of trust. Demonstrating clinical effectiveness must remain at the center of this effort. However, particularly for diagnostics where safety and performance can be assessed without randomising patients to different interventions, well-designed retrospective studies and real-world evidence can contribute substantially to the clinical evidence packages, allowing evidence to be generated efficiently and at scale.
Despite these challenges, I remain optimistic. Admittedly biased, I strongly believe Europe can become a category leader in HealthTech and represents a compelling long-term investment opportunity. In a world where the frontier labs, predominantly based in the US, are eating the world, data moats remain attainable because a large fraction of high-quality healthcare data does not sit on the web. At the same time, our infrastructure of trust and regulation creates more durable and defensible competitive advantages for companies building in this space.
